Susa

Susa is in Iran, a country in Asia.

It was a city for a very, very long time. When old houses fell down, people built new ones on top. Now the old city is a group of big hills full of buried rooms and treasures.

Susa lies on a flat plain at the foot of the Zagros Mountains in southwest Iran, between two rivers, the Karkheh and the Dez. Today the ruins sit beside the modern town of Shush.

People lived at Susa for more than 6,000 years. Each time a town wore out, people built a new one on top, so the old city slowly rose into a group of high mounds, or artificial hills. Archaeologists have counted 27 towns stacked one above another. Susa was a capital for the Elamites, an ancient people of this region, and later for the kings of the Persian Empire.

UNESCO describes Susa as a group of artificial archaeological mounds on the east bank of the Shavur River, in the Susiana plain between the Karkheh and Dez Rivers at the foot of the Zagros Mountains, with the remains of a later palace across the river. It contains 27 superimposed urban settlements in continuous succession from the late 5th millennium BCE until the 13th century CE.

Britannica calls Susa the capital of Elam (Susiana) and the administrative capital of the Achaemenian king Darius I and his successors from 522 BCE. UNESCO stresses its position where Mesopotamian civilization and the civilizations of the Iranian plateau met and influenced each other, and its value for tracing the region's passage from prehistory to history, including the rise of the early state and of towns.

King Darius built a palace with a giant hall.

Its roof sat on tall stone columns. The columns have fallen, but their huge stone feet are still there. Some walls were covered with shiny colored bricks.

One of Susa's great sights is the palace of Darius I and its Apadana, a huge hall whose roof was held up by rows of tall stone columns. The columns had enormous tops, called capitals, and big stone bases. Today the roof and the columns are gone, but stone bases and broken blocks still lie across the ground.

The palace walls were decorated with carved stone panels and with glazed tiles and bricks, coated in a shiny, colorful layer. Many of these decorations are now kept in museums to protect them, and some are shown in the Louvre in Paris.

UNESCO singles out the royal ensemble of the Palace of Darius and the Apadana: a tall hypostyle hall with porticos, lofty stone columns, gigantic capitals and column bases, and orthostatic and ceramic wall decoration. Together, it says, they made an innovative contribution to a new architectural expression characteristic of the Achaemenid Empire, and from the 6th century BCE Susa helped create a prototype of ceremonial architecture that spread across the Iranian Plateau and its neighbors.

Many decorative elements have been moved to museums for protection; Britannica illustrates an enameled tile frieze from the palace of Darius I, about 510 BCE, now in the Louvre. The excavated remains on site have been stabilized and conserved, respecting their original design and building materials.

Today, visitors walk among the stones of the old palace.

The ground under Susa still hides many secrets. Archaeologists keep studying it to learn more.

In 2015 Susa became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is protected as a national monument by Iran's heritage organization. Because so much of the old city is still buried, archaeologists keep researching around it.

The modern town of Shush has grown right up to the site, so rules now control building near the ruins. Susa is also linked to Persepolis, a great capital founded by the same king, Darius I, in 518 BCE.

Inscribed by UNESCO in 2015, Susa is protected as a national monument and managed by Iran's cultural heritage organization through its Susa Base. UNESCO reports that recent unplanned growth of modern Shush threatens the edges and setting of the property, and that strict planning regulations have been drawn up and must be enforced; the area's high archaeological potential means research and documentation continue.

The river setting has changed with hydraulic works upstream on the Karkheh and Shavur Rivers. Darius I also founded Persepolis in 518 BCE as the capital of the Achaemenid Empire, built on a vast terrace.